There’s an old rule in journalism that trends can be spotted when you hear/see the same item happening three times in a row over a short period. If that’s the case, the trifecta yesterday was: Yahoo! announcing native support for RSS and ATOM in the “my yahoo” page Bloglines announcing a new set of services to ease the load of distribution Newsgator announcing new partnerships to drive adoption Let’s review why those announcements herald the arrival of RSS into the mainstream. Yahoo! and RSS As Jeremy Zawodny said, it does something […]–something that Yahoo is in a unique position to do: bring RSS to the masses. Why is this significant? Well, quite simply, while geeks like myself and readers of this blog know, RSS is still something for early adopters. Every time a large player gets into that field, the concept gains a little more traction. With the arrival of RSS into the Yahoo! personal page, the format becomes a major new delivery channel for content creators. With this, TNL.net can now figures prominently next to Reuters feed, being given the same kind of weight. It represents a major shift in the way Yahoo! distributes content. In the late 1990s,…

Tomorrow’s agenda for BloggerCon calls for a discussion of blog and journalism. Over the past few weeks, I’ve been reading what other people had to say, synthesizing it in my own head and trying to figure out what it all meant. From there, I came to a couple of conclusions: Blogs are not journalism Journalism happens on blogs Blogs are the single biggest threat to the online publishing industry and the print publishing industry. Blogs are the single largest opportunity to the online publishing industry and could represent a big opportunity for the print industry. I know it sounds like 2 sets of contradictory statements but I’m really not hedging my bets here. What is happening is that blogs are representing such a radical shift in online publishing that what the response is from journalists and other content publishers will either increase or decrease the impact of the blogging phenomenon. What is happening is not so much a revolution as a continuing evolution of the trends started with the rise of the commercial Internet. Looking back, looking forward Let’s first take a step back in order to better understand the blogging phenomenon. They year is 1994. At that point, the…

Internet.com reports about the logic behind unpatched systems. A lot of it goes to the fact that system administrators are deluged with new patches and are fed up of high level alerts on inessential patches. However, when a system crashes, the blame falls squarely on the shoulders of the system administrator. In order to resolve this, two things need to happen: First of all, there needs to be a better understanding overall of what danger security vulnerabilities represent. When it comes down to it, it is not just the system administrator responsibility to ensure that systems are secure. If software developers are careful in their implementations and consider security implications of the choices they are making when designing and developing software, the risk of an exploit is lowered. Secondly, there is a need for better education in general. Most user neither know or care about vulnerabilities. By default, most machines are not even set to auto-update. There are a number of ways this can be solved. Operating System vendors like Apple, Microsoft, and Redhat already offer an automated way to apply patches to a machine. These tools should be turned on by default to ensure that “most” machines get patched…

Today, Earthweb and Internet.com announced that Internet.com was acquiring all of Earthweb’s content properties. For me, it’s an interesting announcement because I was involved in the building of both properties. When I left Internet.com in 1996 and went to Earthweb, I was in charge of building Earthweb’s properties into something competitive with Internet.com. At the time, there were already a few players in the news market and I decided that Earthweb’s best positioning was to stay focused on the developer community instead of trying to do just Internet related stuff. Many people (including a lot of people on this list) have asked me what I thought of this announcement. So here it is. Two roads converge In a way, today’s announcement was one that didn’t surprise me much. Over the years, I’ve stayed in touch with people at both companies and, as time went on, I came to realize that both properties should be integrated. Before Earthweb’s IPO, such discussions were held both at Earthweb and at Internet.com and there seems to seem some differing views on the subject. However, I had always been nagged by the feeling that the two properties (the developer.com network and the internet.com network) would…

As regular readers of this newsletter know, I’ve been looking a fair amount at how to get untethered from the Internet lately. While I have played with a wireless Palm and looked at WAP, there seemed to be something missing to the whole unconnected Internet issue. What I came to realize is that what works for a computer does not necessarily work in a wireless environment. The main issue is input and output. A wireless Palm is great to get information but somewhat difficult to use to send out email (typing in graffiti being the biggest challenge so far) and WAP works well to get little bits and pieces of information but is limited to a set number of characters (depending on which version of WAP you’re using, you will get an allocation of between 1500 and 2000 characters). As a result, sending out something like this newsletter over WAP does not seem to make sense. However, a new breed of services is now popping up and it could be the next big thing: connecting to the Internet by just dialing into a phone number. In order to test this out, I checked out several services: Tellme Networks, which launched…